Actor turns dour into power

Known for his broad smile and his sex appeal, Dennis Quaid appears as a mournful academic in Smart People -- a movie that required him to wear a full beard and a fat suit.

Known for his broad smile and his sex appeal, Dennis Quaid appears as a mournful academic in Smart People -- a movie that required him to wear a full beard and a fat suit.

As Lawrence Wetherhold, the actor -- known for his exuberant performances, general effervescence and the act of setting a piano on fire as Jerry Lee Lewis (Great Balls of Fire) -- had to change his walk, downshift his attitude and internalize the professor's dour complexities.

"To tell you the truth," said Quaid, 54, "I wondered why they wanted me for this role."

But in a career and life that has had its ups and downs, Quaid's Wetherhold might end up being one of the touchstones in his career -- much the way the closeted Frank Whitaker was in Far From Heaven or Arlis Sweeney was in the Flesh and Bone.

Both were roles that few might associate with Quaid and ones that even the actor wasn't sure he could play.

"I was going to bow out of it," he said. "But I came to the conclusion that -- well, I hate to say the word risk or 'taking risks' because what's risky about acting?

"You know, being in combat, now that's risky. But I felt I needed to do something that maybe I was afraid to do."

Not until the Texas-bred actor met Murro did he decide to do the role in a film written by novelist and short-story writer Mark Poirier (Goats, Naked Pueblo), and steeped in academia.

Wetherhold, a professor of Victorian lit, is a widower with a daughter, Vanessa (Ellen Page of Juno), who's too clever for her own good; a brother ("adopted brother," Wetherhold always adds), played by Thomas Haden Church; and a disaffected poet son (Ashton Holmes). His on-again/off-again girlfriend, Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), is a doctor.

They shine with an aggregate intellectual light, but none seems capable of getting out of his or her own emotional way.

"That's why it was called Smart People," Murro said, "because they're all dumb."

It's new terrain for Quaid, who is perhaps better-known for some of his earliest roles -- The Right Stuff, in which he played Gordon Cooper, or detective Remy McSwain in The Big Easy or Gavin Grey in Everybody's All-American.

"I was a guy back in the '80s who was one movie away from a huge career," Quaid said, "which, at that time, didn't happen."

To get inside Lawrence -- "He was one of those guys I like to work from the outside in," Quaid said -- the actor didn't wander far from the page. Or his own life.

"I didn't draw on anybody I knew or who was in my past," he said.

On the other hand, "There have been times when I've been like Lawrence, a walking-wounded person, unaware that I even needed to change a thing, stuck in a way," said Quaid, who has had well-publicized trouble with drugs and marriage (notably, with actress Meg Ryan).